Parbaking, Pretzels and Rye

"Parbaking is a cooking technique in which a bread or dough product is partially baked and then rapidly frozen for storage. The raw dough is baked normally, but halted at about 80% of the normal cooking time, when it is rapidly cooled and frozen."

-- Wikipedia. They really want donations now.

Last time I made rye bread I parbaked a loaf and stuck it in the freezer so my housemates wouldn't starve without fresh bread. That was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but I realized that it may provide a good way to have fresh, homemade bread without the 4-6 hour lead time.  So this weekend while I was making rye bread (8 hours) I decided to experiment with parbaking a simpler loaf.

I mixed up a simple loaf--white flour, water, salt, yeast, and some whole wheat flour and olive oil for flavor, and no recipe because I eyeballed everything except for the salt--and set it to rise while I prepped my rye bread loaves for the oven. The rye got the silpat treatment, with a dusting of flour and a nice shaping (I forgot to slash until 5 minutes into baking, which was a shame). 

The whole wheat was divided in two and plopped down into my loaf pans to help me control the variables I'm working with.  Loaf bread will have the same shape regardless of its hydration level, meaning that varying my ad-hoc recipe will still give somewhat consistent results.

After 20 minutes of baking I pulled the whole wheat bread out and stuck it on a rack to cool briefly.  It was fully risen but just barely turning golden on top.  Then into plastic bags and into the freezer, and I'll see how I did later in the week!

Meanwhile my rye bread was doing its usual long, slow rise.  This was the third time I've made it and the first one was by far the best.  I'm starting to think that this is purely because I cut the caraway in the second two loaves.  It's possible that the delicious flavor I associate with rye bread is just caraway, caraway, caraway.

Finally, I also made pretzels with real lye again last week.  Last time I failed to understand the difference between parchment paper and wax paper and melted my wax paper to the pretzels.  This time around I had a silpat and used that.  The result was a real, proper lye pretzel:

Cafe Solaar, now with pastries

Hey all,

I frequently get asked why I don't make more pastries, and my answer is always that if I tried out five pastry recipes my housemates would have heart attacks from eating them and I'd have to pay rent for everybody for the month.  And then I wouldn't have any money left for ingredients.

That being said, I would like to try out some pastry recipes.  It's just a challenge because they're never as good the next day--so I can't take them to work or karate.

We've had a running joke that we're running a coffee shop at our house.  People stop by and we almost always hand them a tasty espresso or a cappuccino with the latest attempts at latte art.  Sometimes on the weekends we have waffles, sometimes pancakes, sometimes fresh fruit or fresh bread--but never pastries.  And what's a coffee shop without pastries?

So here's the idea: one of the next few weekends I'll make all of the recipes that have been sitting on the back burner for a while.  I'll stock up on butter, make some proper croissant dough, and borrow a Tartine cookbook from somebody.  Maybe I'll try to make morning buns.  Maybe macarons and muffins, or tarts and toffee.

Would you show up and save my housemates from themselves?  Are there any tasty recipes you've been itching to try?  Do you want to come help bake in my house, or do you like the idea of free butter?  Let me know, and I'll see what I can do to make it happen.

Cheers!

Stand mixer and rye bread

I got a new-to-me electric blue Kitchenaid stand mixer last week.  Michael and I worked together to buy it and in the first day we made three separate batches of deliciousness with it.

First came the blueberry muffins, ready and waiting on the table when I rolled out of my room.  Then I tried a rich, sweet bun with bacon and onions inside.  The bacon was cooked by filling the pan with water, dropping the bacon into it, and cooking until all of the water had boiled off.  I delegated that task to anybody else in the house who would take it.

The recipe called for a stick of butter and half a cup of milk.  We were out of milk so I used almost a cup of heavy whipping cream instead, which made the final bread deliciously rich.

Makin' the bacon

Tiny bacon packages

Adem with the bacon

Happy ball of dough

Bacon disappearing

The bacon rolls went in only a few minutes.  I also made some with no bacon and ate them on the plane as travel food the next day.

Next came rye bread from this Smitten Kitchen recipe.  I baked two loaves: one parbaked, so I pulled it out and stuffed it in the freezer before it was finished baking.  The second one came out of the oven and disappeared in five minutes, and was rated one of the best tasting breads I've made by Nathan.  I think this was due to the large number of caraway seeds.  I'm trying this recipe again a few times to make sure I can make it consistently, then I'll be varying the ratios of rye and white flour to get a darker loaf.

I parbaked the loaf on request from Nathan because I was heading out of town for a week; halfway through the week he pulled it out of the freezer and chucked it into the oven and got to enjoy homemade bread even without the baker.  This is also a good way for me to have fresh bread ready to eat at any time.

The strangest thing about the stand mixer is definitely how clean my hands were at the end of making the dough.  I like it for making very wet, hard-to-knead doughs; the rye dough and ciabatta doughs are a great example of these things.  I'm also planning to use it for making cookies.  Open engineering challenge: design an add-on to the Kitchenaid to extrude, cut, and place cookies on a sheet.

Mmm

More rye bread is in the oven now.  If it doesn't disappear overnight I'll be taking it to karate--and if you're from kenpo and reading this, I suggest you bring cheese.